Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (38 page)

The master-slave relationship is the most popular fantasy per version in the literature of pornography. The image of a scantily clothed slave girl, always nubile, always beautiful, always docile, who sinks to her knees gracefully and dutifully before her master, who stands with or without boots, with or without whip, is com monly accepted as a scene of titillating sexuality. From the slave harems of the Oriental potentate, celebrated in poetry and dance, to the breathless descriptions of light-skinned fancy women, de rigueur in a particular genre of pulp historical fiction, the glorifica tion of forced sex under slavery, institutional rape, has been a part of our cultural heritage, feeding the egos of men while subverting the egos of women-and doing irreparable damage to healthy

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sexuality in the process. The very words "slave girl" impart to many a vision of voluptuous sensuality redolent of perfumed gardens and sof t music strummed on a lyre. Such is the legacy of male-con trolled sexuality, under which we struggle.

ADDENDUM: THE CLIOMETRICIANS

By running two sets of statistics into a computer and by making a few unsupported, outlandish statements, "cliometri cians" Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman argue in Time on the Cross, their statistical view of slave history, that the sexual abuse of black women by white men was not a common occurrence. Dis missing all known reports collected by the abolitionists, they write:

Even if all these reports were true, they constituted at most a few hundred cases. By themselves, such a small number of obser vations out of a population of millions could just as easily be used as proof of the infrequency of the sexual exploitation of black women as of its frequency. The real question is whether such cases were common events that were rarely reported, or whether they were rare events that were frequently reported.

This is a "real question" only for someone who does not want to accept how infrequently cases of sexual assault are reported even in this day and age, let alone in the time when Angelina Grimke wrote, "We forbear to lif t the veil of private life any higher."

Fogel and Engerman heap scorn on Fanny Kemble for having a distorted vision of slavery based on her "upper-class English" bias. In fact, Kemble's origins were not upper class. She was the daughter of a family of celebrated but impecunious actors who relied on her income-hence her gamble on a marriage to Pierce Butler. Ignoring the reasons why her /ournal remained suppressed for twenty-five years, they try to slough it off as "a polemic aimed at rallying British support to the northern cause."
It
is not a polemic, as the dictionary defines the word, nor was it aimed at the British at the time of its inception. These errors of fact and inter pretation could have been cleared up if Fogel and Engerman had read the Journal in its entirety, had read the Butler divorce papers, or had read one of the several biographies of Kemble.

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Claiming they deal in facts, not conjecture, the authors, by presenting the results of two tangential computer runs, argue that white men did not as a rule molest black women, coyly adding that in their opinion interracial exploitation "would undermine the air of mystery and distinction on which so much of the authority of large planters rested." The first standard they employ is an analysis of the number of mulattoes reported in the
186o
census. Thirty· nine percent of the freedmen in Southern cities were reported as mulatto that year. Among urban slaves the proportion was
20
percent and among rural slaves, who constituted 95 percent of the slave population, the percentage of reported mulattoes was 9.9. Since the overwhelming majority of slaves lived in rural areas, the authors required no sleight of hand to arrive at a figure of
10.4
percent for the census proportion of mulattoes in the entire South· em slave population. From this they conclude, "Far from proving that the exploitation of black women was ubiquitous, the available data on mulattoes strongly militates against that contention."

Several things are wrong here. The progeny of an interracial union can "come up dark" or "come up light," so in itself the color of the offspring is no sure.fire test. Secondly, how were these
186o
census reports obtained? In their supplemental methodology vol· ume Fogel and Engerman tell us that the census was taken by "thousands of enumerators" who were "drawn from the category of literate middle· and upper·class whites," and who used
the
criterion
of skin
color. We may assume that the freedmen reported their heritage to the enumerators in person, but do the authors suggest that the slaves did the same, or that the industrious enumerators entered the grounds of each and every plantation and counted heads and judged color from shack to shack?

It is reasonable to assume that the owners did all the reporting for their slaves, particularly in the rural areas, and it is reasonable to assume that plantation owners would be most reluctant to admit to the government that they were siring mulatto children especially since miscegenation was technically against the law. Plantation owners, I am certain, saw what they wanted to see, and reported what they wanted to report to their class allies, those middle·and upper·class white enumerators. Any census statistic on the proportion of mulattoes on a plantation would be a most unreliable figure. In addition, why do Fogel and Engerman assume that a rape, even in a "non-contraceptive society," as they put it, is

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necessarily going to result in pregnancy and birth? Periods of fer tility being what they are, a rapist plays Russian roulette with more than twenty chambers, yet the authors would have us believe he impregnates every time.

This fallacy in thinking also affects the import of their second set of computed facts. From a limited number of plantation rec ords, the authors of Time on the Cross draw up a distribution chart indicating the age of slave mothers at the time they gave birth to their first child. ( Unfortunately the cliometricians do not tell us how large a sample was available to them.) Thirty-six percent of all first births took place between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, and an additional 4 percent took place among girls below the age of fif teen. "Some readers might be inclined to stress that 40 percent of all first births took place before the mothers were
20,"
the authors generously admit-in the fine print of their methodology volume. In their major volume they write only that "the average age at first birth was
22.
5, the median age was
20.8."

The median age is the more significant of these two figures, since it shows that there were as many first births below the age of

20.8
as there were above. The average age in the Fogel-Engerman computation is beefed up by each first birth that planter records claim occurred at age thirty-five and over; it does not mean that "most" slave women gave birth to their first child at twenty-two.

From this limited presentation Fogel and Engerman extrapo late, "Only abstinence would explain the relative shortage of births in the late-teen ages," and "the high fertility rate of slave women was not the consequence of the wanton impregnation of very young unmarried women by either white or black men." They hopefully conclude, "The high average age of mothers at first birth also suggests that slave parents closely guarded their daughters from sexual contact with men."

Leaving aside the entire question of the accuracy of slave ages, which does not seem to bother the authors, or the incidence of spontaneous miscarriage and folk-remedy abortions for the very young ( information certainly not available) , what is most trou bling about these first-birth statistics is that nowhere are they matched up against the average age of menarche, the time of the first menstrual period. As it happens, the age at which menstrua tion begins has been perceptibly declining.
In
i96o
it fell between twelve and thirteen; however, in 186o first menstruation usually

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occurred between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Not only that, there is evidence in modem medicine and anthropology that fertil ity in the first few years af ter the onset of menstruation is compara tively low.

Fogel and Engerman's statistics tell us nothing about the sexual exploitation of black women in slavery. Statistical analysis is a valuable tool when it deals with reported crime. Unreported crime, however, remains beyond the magic of computers.

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The Police-Blotter Rapist